Review of the Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity - the History of the Michaelic Movement since the death of Rudolf Steiner - by Ben-Aharon

 Review of The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity, the History of the Michaelic Movement since the Death of Rudolf Steiner – an Esoteric Study by Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon

Temple Lodge, 2020, 338 pages 

Rudolf Steiner said, “As far as Anthroposophy is concerned, the Christmas Conference was either everything or nothing.” (GA 240). The same can be said of this book as a representative product of the whole of Ben-Aharon’s life and work: either this book is everything or it is nothing! 

The text contains 5 lectures that were originally given by Ben-Aharon in 2019 at the annual meeting of the School of Spiritual Science. The center of the book is a powerful call for us to wake up! Can we take off our blinders and see the painful but real spiritual position of humanity right now in the 21st century? The new light and love is now raying forth with growing energy from the Etheric Christ Event that is taking place in the spiritual fields closest to our daily consciousness – but do ‘anthroposophists’ remember, sense, and behold it? 

He writes that without developing this new form of imaginative cognition schooled through pure thinking, and also enlightening such free insight with the spiritual light of the Second Coming, we are no longer really connected as loyal students to the continual rebirth of the spiritual being of Anthroposophy. (p 327) “In order to experience and embody this infinite wisdom, truth, beauty and love and grow with it, each one must recognize, confront, heal and transform his and her lower nature... On this one decisive cliff, on the edge of this abyss, we repeatedly turn backward and therefore fall and lose our humanity...[but] we are eternally responsible for all our deeds and misdeeds.” (p 198)

This new etheric Christ-enlivened, Imaginative capacity, coupled with the basic self-knowledge required to approach the real spiritual world, as demonstrated in Steiner’s basic books, can then be used to penetrate into the dark and unconscious elements in each of our souls. Ben-Aharon humbly describes his own tumultuous biography – the opportunities, limits, and failures he encountered after meeting the etheric Christ at the age of 21 and while trying to bring His work to the earth over 40 years. He shows that these painful life lessons can be understood in their archetypal form through the Grail mysteries of Amfortas and Parsifal. “My two natures, the higher and the lower, became like opposite mirror images, and I was standing in the middle, unable to merge them into harmonious wholeness.” (p 18)  He then describes in detail how he was able to spiritually transform and heal these wounds by opening his whole heart and penetrating with feeling to the depth of his being. Like Parsifal, he had to recognize precisely how he had hurt his family in a soul and spiritual way before he could become whole. (pp 24-25) 

He shows that each one of us also has to walk this path in self-knowledge. Each one of us has to admit the painful reality that any spiritual scientific striving that does not feel the shock of World War 2 and the powers that warped the whole earth and the very nature of every human being, cannot really take one step forward. Yet each one of us must create a spark in order to join the spiritual flame. No passivity is possible any longer, as Ben-Aharon showed in his book The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century, because the Gods will no longer just give us the answer or the necessary forces. Here he deepens the description of that Event that took place between Michaelic souls and the Christ Spirit in the Spiritual World from 1933-1945. “It is an important part of our work to connect the three events, the twilight of the gods, the twilight of humanity in the twentieth century and its possible resurrection in the twenty-first century. We must become ourselves the seeds of humanity’s future resurrection.” (p 43) 

In order to contribute to this resurrection, new karmic plans were developed in the spiritual world in a spiritual council from 1945-1955. The reincarnation of a small band of Aristotelian souls who remained loyal to Rudolf Steiner was postponed, and instead a small group of the Platonic souls incarnated in the 2nd half of the 20th century. The task was now shifted into a small pioneering band of Platonic souls to use their high spiritual faculties to consciously develop a spiritual scientific path from human consciousness to the new Christ Event and Rudolf Steiner’s continued work in the Michael School. Only then could some of the Aristotelian souls begin to incarnate. Ben-Aharon’s work on the Christ Event has made this new co-working between reincarnating Aristotelians and Platonists possible in the 21st century. A community must now create a living etheric heart organ to pass down and expand during the whole Michael Age. The Michaelic Spirits are now working in an intensified way to help such honest community building work, such as through the new Reversed Cultus Ben-Aharon is developing. These heart practices are already becoming a reality in the Global Event College and the School of Spiritual Science (established in 2009).  In this book, we get the rare glimpse into the growth of a Michaelic esoteric school in real time. The book is a call for inspired people to join this work. 

Ben-Aharon also shows with uplifting vitality how the Michaelic movement can be resurrected today through the forces of the new work with the spirit of Vidar and the Etheric Christ, “We must take every physical word and deed of Rudolf Steiner and carry them to the presently living and active etheric world, where they can be transformed by the real spiritual events of the last century. Then we must let them be transformed accordingly to activate their spiritual etheric essence in our work with each other here and now.” (p 98)  This book is truly an esoteric study, and there are other important disclosures and hints that cannot be outlined here.

The Afterword describes the world-changing esoteric deeds that were accomplished by the Christ Being from the end of the 19th century, through 1933 and up to 1998, where He not only was spiritually crucified or suffocated, but actually buried and held firm inside His tomb by the evil deeds of humans. Indeed the Angel of the Christ was so wounded, that He needed the second half of the 20th century to be healed by the deeds of human love on the Earth. This intensification and healing of the Christ can also lead to humanity’s resurrection and the growth of a new spiritual consciousness, community, and love in the 21st century. Christ speaks, “The offer of all my love, life and light is constantly streaming into your etheric hearts. Take my offer into your whole being actively, encourage and empower yourself and your fellow humans! Unite with my cosmic deeds of healing and redemption, and join my angelic hosts, to build together the new Earthly-Human Sun!” (p 307) 

Is Ben-Aharon’s work truly connected to the continued work of Rudolf Steiner and the school of Michael in the spiritual world? Yes! This is indeed so, based on my own independent spiritual research and modest experience. The heart-beat of Michael and Christ pulsates through every word of this book, and for me this book is everything!  I mean that this book is a true and clear testimony that the Michaelic movement since the death of Rudolf Steiner is developing further, and that a spiritual scientific path exists to actualize such a new school of Love on the earth in the 21st century. I would recommend that everyone study this book as preparation for the celebration of the centennial of the Christmas Conference and for many years afterwards.

Scott Elliot Hicks, author of The Resurrection of Thinking (2018), and Earthly, Transcendental, & Spiritual Logic (2019). 

A simile to help you become conscious of the various layers and faculties active in thinking and imagining - The Painter and Her Canvas

 

                                                        Painting by Andreea Dumata 

1. Carefully observe a plant or an animal. Make a clear mental image. Make sure you clearly think through the idea of what this plant or animal is. Make all of your normal associations of the ideas and memories that are linked with this plant or animal. 

2. Now let us start to carefully separate the different parts or layers or elements of what you just accomplished while thinking and perceiving in normal consciousness. 

Look at the mental image or memory image of the animal in your mind's eye. Consider these aspects: 

i. The CANVAS - What are the qualities of this substance on which you 'paint' this memory image?  In other words, what is the canvas of memory made of? What are its qualities? 

ii. The BRUSHES - How do you change the colors or size of a mental image or memory picture? How do you change the angle you are viewing it from? What tools do you use to paint on the canvas? 

iii. The PAINT container - Where does the memory image come from? If you change its color or background, how do you dip your cognitive tools or brushes into the paint can? Where are the paint cans stored?  How do the brushes actually work? 

iv. The PAINTER's HANDS - When you rotate or enlarge or change the colors of a mental picture, or a memory image, what 'hands' are you using to turn this image? What are the acts of will that are working with the brushes?

v. The MODEL - How do you know what you are painting on the canvas of memory? How do you know you are still thinking about a duck and not an eagle? How do you compare the memory image on the canvas from the MEANING of the original Model you are using as your reference?  

vi. LOOKING at the MODEL vs. PAINTING - What different activities are taking place when you rotate or enlarge or alter the memory image VS when you understand, see, recognize, and think of the pure content or IMAGELESS concept that controls the meaning of the painting?  (In my Husserl book, I discuss this at length). 

vii. WHY are you PAINTING?  Justify the moral reasons why you are painting this image in the first place? What justifies your right to paint this image or investigate the cognitive apparatus at all? This marks the difference between spiritual-moral research and mere subjective, intellectual, or psychological playing. (I discuss this in my Resurrection of Thinking book). 

viii. The PAINTER - Where is the real painter? Is she inside your body? Where does she take up a vantage point to invite new models to sit? How does he conceive of new paintings? Is the painter being painted?  Are there other painters watching from the corners of the art studio?  How do they affect the painting?  

ix. ERASE the painting and WAIT with devotion. What arises here?  In regard to Dumata's painting above - what is inside the Red light that shines through the Door in the woods? Who paints the painter? (For more, see Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon's works). 

Repeat and enjoy! 

Podcast (Against Everything) with Conner Habib: Scott E. Hicks on Thinking as a Path of Spiritual Development

Against Everything Podcast featuring Conner Habib and Scott E. Hicks

I had a great time talking with Conner on a variety of subjects. The topics of his podcasts are quite wide-ranging and he is a unique and interesting guy. Check it out! 

Metaphors to Help You Experience the Difference between Pure Thinking and its Reflection in the Physiological Organism

 1. Take a look at a Birch Tree. Do you see its thousands of leaves moving in the wind? Living thinking that is conscious of its own spiritual activity is like the wind that blows the leaves, creating all of their complex patterns and motions. But no one would say that the movements of the 1000s of leaves create the motion of the wind. Likewise, you are the upright Spirit-I who thinks self-consciously and intuitively in the folds of real-thinking acts - you are like the spirit of the wind that blows the leaves. The brain and the nervous system are the leaves. 

2. Consider a puppet show. Do you see the complex movements of many different characters on the stage? Living and pure thinking that intuits or dives into the moment by moment acts of its spiritual creativity is like the human actor who puts his hand in a puppet. No one would say that the puppets' motions are the real action and that the human actors below the stage are the creations of the puppets. Likewise, the real thinking I is like the willful activity in the human hand that produces complex reflected movement in the puppet. The physiology of the human mineral body and the dying part of the life body is the where the puppet-show takes place. 

3. Consider the complex print from a woodcut. Do you see the tiny lines and curves of the ink that displays a rich picture on the paper? Spiritual activity in thinking which is intuitively free is like a moving forest growing and walking - a living fabric of wood. If consciousness stops to observe the current living fabric with the eye of living thinking, it freezes the scene. There is now a woodcut. Then I press this woodcut into ink, and then press the inky side onto paper. No one would say that the ink on paper has caused the woodcut. Also, the person looking at the print would suppose that the original woodcut was the only 'original' and would not even know about the living flowing fabric of wood.  Is there a very close resemblance between the woodcut and the print? Yes - but let us note which one is the cause of the other. Living thinking is like the growing invisible wooden landscape. It is 'wooden' because it is substantial and real, the projection of this living thinking into self-consciousness on the earth is like the process of freezing the landscape into just one picture. The printing process (noticed how it is reversed) is like the creation of the mental image, which is then reflected in a symbolic and distributed chemical and biological pattern onto the brain and nervous system. 

The Spiritualization of Mathematics through the Event of Anthroposophy - Awakening to the Living Continuum

The Mathematical Continuum - Finding the living Infinite

‘‘There are two labyrinths of the human mind: one concerns the composition of the continuum, and the other the nature of freedom, and both spring from the same source—the infinite’. —G.W. Leibniz

Brouwer describes his understanding of the problems of the continuum as follows: 

“In the following chapters we shall go further into the basic intuition of mathematics (and of every intellectual activity) as the substratum, divested of all quality, of any perception of change, a unity of continuity and discreteness, a possibility of thinking together several entities, connected by a 'between', which is never exhausted by the insertion of new entities. Since continuity and discreteness occur as inseparable complements, both having equal rights and being equally clear, it is impossible to avoid one of them as a primitive entity, trying to construe it from the other one, the latter being put forward as self-sufficient; in fact it is impossible to consider it as self-sufficient. Having recognised that the intuition of continuity, of 'fluidity', is as primitive as that of several things conceived as forming together a unit, the latter being at the basis of every mathematical construction, we are able to state properties of the continuum as a 'matrix of points to be thought of as a whole'. First of all, there is neither a first nor a last point…” ---L. E. J. Brouwer, Writings vol 1. 

  

What is the notion of the mathematical continuum? 

The continuum is “an infinite collection whose elements are themselves infinite sets, each of whose elements in turn is an infinite sequence.” Cantor’s set theory makes this concept mathematically rigorous. (Shapiro, 'Oxford Philosophy of Mathematics' pdf p 321) 

Phemister says of Leibniz p 116  - “Leibniz’s solution [ is ] that the continuum is composed of indivisible living corporeal substances." These are what Leibniz calls the Monads. 

Deleuze describes the connections between such a virtual consciousness of flux and fold and the work of Leibniz: 

“En même temps que l'objet devient objectile, le sujet devient superjet. Entre la variation et le point de vue il y a un rapport nécessaire : non pas simplement en raison de la variété des points de vue... mais en premier lieu parce que tout point de vue est point de vue sur une variation. Ce n'est pas le point de vue qui varie avec le sujet, du moins en premier lieu ; il est au contraire la condition sous laquelle un éventuel sujet saisit une variation (métamorphose), ou quelque chose = x ( anamorphose). Le perspectivisme chez Leibniz, et aussi chez Nietzsche, chez William et chez Henry James, chez Whitehead, est bien un relativisme, mais ce n'est pas le relativisme qu'on croit. Ce n'est pas une variation de la vérité d'après le sujet, mais la condition sous laquelle apparaît au sujet la vérité d'une variation. C'est l'idée même de la perspective baroque.”

--- Deleuze, Le Pli et Le Baroque p 27 

The essential idea that we uncover and merge with as we consider Deleuze’s comments are as follows. The flowing of folding-object streams (Newton calls these ‘fluents’ in his calculus) melt together with the subject who becomes more than himself in a super-jection. Continual and infinite metamorphosis of infinite curves and flexing on the plane do not just produce an infinite variety, but this continual metamorphosis is the condition on which the subject himself is created. The fact that the spatial point of view changes as the perceiver moves around in space does not exhaust the intuitive vistas that are available to the awakened self-conscious I. The point of view of the subject in baroque geometry and architecture does not merely show relativism, but shows that the infinite becoming of the other at the flexible vanishing point (the folding virtual point) is also the differential origin of any subjectivity. Fluid variation forms the root of the subject. 

This is a fine transition zone, where the self-conscious I, that has been trained by the living soul of Anthroposophy, can now perceive what is inside the house and what is outside the window, by becoming a coherent, balanced, larger sense of Self - a multiplicity, coordinated by a Spirit-Self outside of space, time, and personality. This spiritualization of Deleuze’s work is necessary if one is to grasp the spiritual life at the bottom of living or etheric-virtual mathematics. Etheric and spiritual love form the personality and karma forms the vehicles in which his motion takes place. 

The opening and loving source of spiritual life has no bottom or end. When I am self-consciously united and merged with this spiritual light, love, and self-perceiving rigorous wakefulness in pure thinking-willing, I can see where the tendencies to infinitely divide every plane come from. This tendency comes from the desire to uncover more of the infinite love that powers all desire and all of my self - to learn from the acts of spiritual beings in the depth of my own spirit. It should be recognized that the representing or willed picturing that projects a web or organization of the dead part of the personal etheric body, imagines that this infinite life can be infinitely subdivided in the sense of cutting a plane, or inserting more space in between two spaces. But this is a concept that controls the parameters of the plane of representation, it is not the pure experience of intuitive willed-thinking, living inside the pure spiritual act of meaning-life. But this concept also controls and organizes the pure flow and chaos of momentary sense perceptions and feelings. The following must be understood quite clearly: when I cut a block of cheese into two large parts, and then subdivide this cheese into smaller bits, and then subdivide these into 50 tiny pieces, let us say, the number of ‘pieces’ is not what is perceived. We represent the number of pieces on the plane of representation which we create unconsciously. In the pure flow of colors and the sense of weight and perspective and changing shades, there are no parts.

The pure flux of sensation and pure percept flow can never be divided. Only consciousness divides, and it does this on the plane of representation or the plane of mathematics. So we actually have two flowing wholes. On the side of pure perception, the pure flux of world-formations. On the other side, the infinite gift of the archetype unveiled in the seed of the intuited pure concept or virtual meaning-light-archetype. It is only in between, in this thin plane where our normal consciousness is constructed by the ahrimanic and luciferic powers, that we find the tendency to want to divide ‘matter’ infinitely into electro-magnetic components in a materialistic way (Ahriman), or imagine ecstatically the numerical infinity that bypasses all human life, such as infinite extent of space, infinite galaxies, never-ending numerical sequences, and so on (Lucifer). That does not mean that we should not school our consciousness with utmost rigor on this mathematical plane, but it does mean that we must self-consciously perceive, create, and freely navigate into the spiritual worlds of life and love that are beyond it. This requires the truly down to earth human and loving Christ-Spirit, teaching us in the bottom of our free I. 

Thus we find that the human continuum must be a new seedling, planted by the Christ or the eternal source of turning death into life. I can always find new life in between dead space, there is always more spiritual time in between the moments of my personal biography. The garments of my own life, will be spiritualized by the hierarchies when I hand it over. But this exchange can also be started on the earth. 

How Robust is the New Solar-Earth!

Let us now feed cosmos and nature
With fluids of life unfolded from science
Returning their gifts, a thousandfold heightened
Sailing a ship of self-hood enlightened

The pulsing of life is rounded and instant
Pouring its soul in the fanfare of dawn
Rolling out light, rising and roiling
Warming the heart where ether is boiling

Circular curves of invisible seedlings
Popping and rooting in the song of blossoming
Mountains are singing in the tones of Nitrogen
Vapors are curling in the bones of Oxygen

Minerals melting in self-heating lava
At the bottom of pillars and petals of drama
Sulfurous saunas bubbling up diamonds
Of consciousness-light, of Spirit Sublime

Conceptual gases rocketing heavenward
Spiritual elements forged from levity
Cooling the sun to rest in earth's atmosphere
Michael's souls build communities there

Cobalt melts and unveils the Kobolds
Carbon explodes and Dwarves are all weaving
A Rainbow of Folk in their infinite yolk:
"The Humans are coming, they finally awoke!"

Angels sing in the stars, cracking open the caverns
An intake of breath from the Infinite Thought
A drip of the life of the I of the World
Hits the still water in the pool of the pearl.

The forgotten mothers grow nourished and fat
As humans ignite their tinctures of knowledge
Rivers of gold flowing out of their nutshells
Vines crawling upward and shaping new citadels

In the Holy Spirit and in the Iron pulse of Blood
A Chemical Wedding to marry Sophia
In the embryo beats a new human heart
Created by love, where each does his part.



If you like my work, take a look at my books at Amazon. Click here. 

The First Step in Moral-Event Mathematics

No matter how ridiculous it sounds, after the Holocaust and the Event of the 20th century, it is no longer possible to produce mathematical equations, thinking, and calculations without including the conscious, moral reality of superscript or coefficient ‘Ev’ in each move. 2 + 3 = 5 must now become linked to the qualitative supersensible whole to become 2 + 3 = 5Ev. If not, each calculation merely serves to solidify the Ahrimanic-demonic grasp of the intellect which will lead to the great totalitarian AI machine devouring the nature of the human, such as at the end of the Matrix 3. The good spirit-mother (Arithmetica) who leads the shepherds of the fields, animals, and forests, must be given back the treasures of real soul-mathematics - She says to humanity, "You call yourself a mathematician, yet you do not know how many Starlings are in this field, so that you might find the one that is sick to care for. You call yourself a mathematician, yet you do not know how many seeds are in this one raspberry that you devour without thinking. You call yourself a mathematician, yet you do not know the number of your starving brothers and sisters, but only the numbers in your bank accounts, your stock rooms, and your hard-drives." 

The Construction of the Quantitative Plane of Mathematical Relationships from the Virtual Elasticity of the Qualitative Life Body - Philosophy of Spiritual Mathematics

   How is the first point drawn on the plane of mathematics? How does the first quantitative relationship arise on this artificial topography that we draw in our mind's eye, and then point to in our subsequent development of mathematics, logic, and functional explanations in natural science? Deleuze shows us his ripe and robust life, when he concentrates on uncovering the infinite flexibility of the virtual unfolding that makes the first drawing on the mathematical plane possible. The qualitative and invisible flashing flexibility makes possible the first choice of where the line, relationship, logical set, explanatory mapping, tracing, and so on, will be present and frozen in space. Space is created out of this pure etheric fluid that is freed after adolescence of its role in shaping and growing the human physical body. But space is therefore a representational projection on the invisible canvas that we draw on, generally without seeing its contours. Moving in space as a will-being is totally different than projecting vector lines on a grid. The idea of space blocks the real experience of spiritual willing. 

    That is why Deleuze can say that the pure bend, the twisting virtual curves of intensity, the clinamen is not in the world, but it is the world itself. We should add, it is fashioned out of the forces of dying insofar as they are stitched into the memory plane and the plane of space in our representational canvas. For this reason alone, what is stitched with mathematical precision on the gameboard of this plane is not totally true, because it is made out of killing the living wisdom that flows all around us, or in which we are continuously flowing - the spiritual world, made up of beings who carry their moods from different regions of starry wisdom, in wholeness. This never-ending play of possible life, the fluid of potential points that are not-yet drawn (les inflexions) is thus, between dimensions (Deleuze quotes Klee's notions of modern art in 'Le Pli'). It is pure event, this elastic proto-point, proto-curve. 

    This is why Brouwer, Heyting, and Cantor require the infinite at the first moment of the intuition of the plane of mathematics - the qualitative multiplicity of life, created out of the dying part of the ether body, as is shown by Rudolf Steiner, is infinitely divisible (and thus can create any possible configuration); it is also infinitely productive, and its life is never exhausted (when it is connected to the infinite spiritual source of all life). This is also the reason why the pure velocities, pure differences, pure changes in direction are approximated only in calculus: pure change would have to freeze absolutely in order to be calculated and pinned onto the plane, but this would mean that velocity would have to stop in order to show itself on the plane - a self-contradiction in the concepts themselves. For this reason, the nature of the plane of life cannot be 'proved' by using the canvas itself. You can only prove to yourself the limits and the nature of the etheric canvas, where the mathematical plane is organized by historical concepts whose lines remain in memory, time, and of constant length. You can only prove it to yourself, when you see it through intuition. 

    

   But this is not the end of the process! Outside the canvas or the pure elasticity lies the breath of the moral and astral plane, and furthermore, the spiritual world itself. This means that I must also awaken to the moral reality and responsibility of the construction of the mathematical plane itself (by killing and abstraction), and also the infinite life of the Spirit-I who wakes up and sees its activity in dimensions that leave this mathematical grid behind. Then we can live in Imaginations which are themselves world-time realities, that have an infinite life and can think with moral, creative, spirit-thought, which holds the source of mathematics, life, and much more. But here we must weave with real spiritual beings of all kinds, who bypass the pure abstract concerns of projectors onto the plane of representations. This requires awakening the heart as a perceptive-thinking organ. 

Summary of 'The New Experience of the Supersensible' by Yeshayahu (Jesaiah) Ben-Aharon - Chapter 1

A Summary and Overview of Dr. Yeshayahu (Jesaiah) Ben-Aharon’s “The New Experience of the Supersensible – The Anthroposophical Knowledge Drama of Our Time” (1995, Temple Lodge, London) by S.E.Hicks 

Introduction: 

Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual scientific research showed that the Second Coming of Christ will not be another physical incarnation, but rather that He will ‘descend from the clouds’ which means that it will be an appearance and activity that will be only visible in the etheric or first supersensible world. This new Event will usher in a new kind of scientific, logical, precise and moral perception of the spiritual worlds, that will enhance consciousness and self-identity, not diminish it. The Second Coming began in 1933, but was already predicted by Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925).  Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon experienced this new form of the Second Coming in 1975, and has studied his continual relationship to the Christ from that moment forward using enlivened Anthroposophical concepts developed by Steiner. This book is an outcome of 20 years of research of the Second Coming. It consists of an introduction and 7 chapters. The original 8th chapter was published first as The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century (1993). This book is one of the most important works ever written. Researching it over 17 years has changed my life. 

Chapter 1 – The Ur-Mystery of Remembrance (Combining a Memory of the Physical with a Memory of the Spiritual)

We are first shown how the historical Christ event (the Mystery of Golgotha) and the current second manifestation of the spirit of Christ in the life-world are united.  They are united by the weaving together in consciousness of two different streams or features of reality:  living and dying. For a person or a being who is awake in the spiritual worlds, the experience of entering into earthly consciousness is like dying. For a person dying on the earth, the experience of coming to wakefulness in the spiritual world, is actually a birth.  But this can be experienced while we are still alive on the earth. The mighty cosmic Spirit, who is unified with the creator of the Universe in the Spirit Word, is also the source of the nature of the human, and especially the human I. This weaving together of coming to life and passing away, of blooming and decay, is at the center of the work of the guiding Spirit of all Humanity (and He really is the leader of all humanity, not just Judaeo-Christian cultures; He is not controlled by Christian churches. His work and resurrection power is for each man and woman on the whole earth).  Through the New Event which began in 1933 in the etheric or life world (the closest part of the spiritual world), all of us have the potential now to awaken a new sort of scientific, precise, self-conscious clairvoyance or spiritual consciousness. This is given through Christ’s second coming. Many people have already experienced Him. The prototype of this current possibility to transform and awaken our new etheric cognition or objective, scientifically precise Imagination, is in the transformation of the state of consciousness which happened to the original disciples of Jesus on Pentecost. They really had remained unconscious about the spiritual experiences they had undergone with Jesus. They remembered during the Pentecostal period that Christ had been teaching them in the spiritual world (after he rolled away the stone), and they connected this spiritual-memory-perception with the memories of the person they had lived on the earth with for three years in Jesus of Nazareth. They knew in an Imagination who He had been. The 40 days between Easter and Christ’s Ascension were then fully woven together during the last 10 days of the resurrected Christ’s close connection with the earth, and reached a culmination in the speaking of tongues at Pentecost (50 days total). In the same way, we can now learn how to weave the memory coming from our clear sense perception and thinking in our earthly consciousness with the happenings and streams that are flowing in the life world. We can create a Spiritual Memory. Through Christ’s current work (as a soul being shining in the world of life), we are learning how to unite our spiritual life with our conscious daily life, in full wakefulness. The ray of spirit coming from Christ woke the spiritual insight of the disciples, it awoke Dr. Ben-Aharon in 1975, and it can now wake each man and woman on the earth. 

Ben-Aharon writes, “The two life-streams, that of life without memory and that of memory without life, began to cross and impregnate each other...We can also say: the dead memory (intellectual) stream was so powerfully penetrated by the lifeblood stream of the Christ that it could begin to illuminate – that is, awaken – the consciousness of the purely spiritual being and essence of the Christ.” p 27.  But now the creation of this ‘bridge’ of consciousness is possible for each person on the earth in the 21st century. Only part of this process is given through the natural appearance of the etheric Christ, while the selfconscious development and cultivation of this faculty must take place through spiritual scientific practice, study, devotion, and exercises. The disciples’ etheric bodies were transformed, and now our bodies can be transformed. The New Experience of the Supersensible was only made possible because Dr. Ben-Aharon’s etheric body was transformed. “From the point of view of the modern Christ experience and the event of the Second Coming...this special preparation and transformation of the etheric bodies of the disciples is especially significant...[it] contains the purest archetypal life element of Christ’s human lifetime. It serves humanity as the body of spirit memory, the vehicle of the Ur-remembrance of Christ FOR ALL AGES TO COME.” p 30 (caps added). Every link and step that is described in The New Experience is connected to 100s of quotes from Steiner’s collected works.  These are not used as intellectual and abstract reports, but are linked up as lived-through supersensible experiences.  Is this something that is only possible for special people like Dr. Ben-Aharon? No. A small group of people are now beginning to awaken this etheric cognition precisely through combining the New Event with Anthroposophical study in a human community. This is the Independent School of Spiritual Science, which can be compared to the leaves of a plant, that are led by its blooming flower, the Global Event College. The school is directed on the earth by Dr. Ben-Aharon, and directly linked to the Michael School in the Spiritual World, and guided by the continued work of the being who was last incarnated as Rudolf Steiner.      How is this acceleration of wakefulness and insight accomplished? By first releasing and separating the light ether from its tight connection to the physical organism. The etheric body, first released from the head and taken under self-conscious control through anthroposophical work with the early ‘philosophical’ works of Rudolf Steiner, such as the 'Philosophy of Freedom,' is then freed from the physical heart and physical limbs. 

Dr. Ben-Aharon’s book, 'Cognitive Yoga,' shows you how to do this in great detail. In the same way that the living light-seed of Christ’s life became an eternal feature of the spiritual world, and was incorporated into the life bodies of his original disciples, “in this preserved life-organism of the Apostles we have the key both to the Ur-Mystery of spirit remembrance and to the awakening power of the Holy Spirit which is, up to our own days, the archetypal example of the construction of a conscious link between objective and supersensible states of consciousness.” p 31. This means that we can take a copy of this lit up mirror or bud of pulsing life into our own light of consciousness, warmth, tone, and life and we can ‘fill in the outlines’ to make it our own Individual creation, in a fully free and moral way. Ben-Aharon describes from his own research how all of the esoteric Christian work that has been done since the historical event of Christ’s death and resurrection, has built a new heaven in close connection to the physical experience of the earth. It is a more humble holy spirit that encircles the earth like a spiritual atmosphere, and reflects the cosmic Holy Spirit from the highest heavenly regions. The devoted life bodies of the early Christians, as they were filled up with the light of Christ through time, have now become a luminous cloud surrounding and penetrating the earth. This pulsing inspiring aspect of the Holy Spirit is “the universally gathered, Christ-permeated fruits of earthly-human Sun life, received into the womb of virgin Mother Earth and reflected back, overflowing with earthlyheavenly life, awakening human souls to their conscious community with the Christ on Earth itself.” p 32. 

This is the work that the new community of the Independent School of Spiritual Science and the Global Event College is humbly continuing and intensifying today. This requires, first, the shocking self-knowledge of seeing precisely how the dark Ahrimanic spirits are woven into our bodies, souls, and consciousness. We first must recognize how our daily consciousness (in reality, sleeping death) is created by the combination of a reversal of the spirit, and a co-working between Luciferic and Ahrimanic spirits living in us. 

Summary of 'The New Experience of the Supersensible' by Ben-Aharon, Chapters 2-3

Chapter 2 – Saul-Paul at the Gates of Damascus (How is St Paul’s past experience relevant to people on the earth today?) 

No matter what name we use to point to Him, the Christ being has always been the main creative source and original prototype of the evolution of humanity. Ben-Aharon writes, “In great, epochal acts of cosmic-earthly sacrifices, He shaped humanity from the very first steps of its earthly evolution, forming it in the process more and more in His likeness and...increasingly forming Himself also in the likeness of man until the time came when both sides were ripe enough to allow a mutual ‘face to face’ penetration to take place. The first was Jesus of Nazareth’s complete merging in spirit, soul, and body with the cosmic Christ.” p 34.  The second was Paul’s (Lazarus’ initiation was an essential but transitional phase).  St. Paul’s initiation and experience of Christ on the road to Damascus (discussed in Acts, and demonstrated in his Epistles to the Churches in the New Testament) was the first seed of a new and modern type of spiritual awakening. It took place in public during the day, while he was awake, and the spiritual light shone through and transformed the physical world and body. Instead of diminishing wakefulness and self-consciousness (as in older forms of Initiation), Christ enhanced Paul’s self-identity and self-knowledge, merging together incarnation and excarnation. Christ became Paul’s intimate teacher, transforming him directly out of the spiritual worlds. The lives and acts of Jesus and Paul established a living temple or a permanent living process in the spiritual worlds and in the core of the human being itself.  This seed (that holds an infinite power to blossom and copy itself) bestows the potential for every human on the earth to be able to repeat this selfconscious face to face mutual essence exchange with the source of the Spiritual I AM. Since 1933, all humans can potentially experience this, but now we must begin from completely modern, wide-awake, clear thinking and perception, and with a modern ego intact.  Christ’s Second Coming only intensifies our Individual experience of Self, not diminishes it. The power of self is transformed morally. This new appearance demands humans to now stand maturely on their own two feet. In this sense, the individual contributes to his own Initiation.  

Ben-Aharon describes the 3 main elements of the fundamental ‘Pauline method’ from his own experience and research: 1) powerful illumination of self-knowledge and recognition of the death forces, 2) transformation and reshaping of man’s soul, and 3) the gift of the future seeds of body, soul, and spirit, which give man the free responsibility to shape himself and the earth. What St Paul experienced is the essence of what all humans can now unfold as they begin, one by one, to be pealed open and turned inside out by the new Christ teaching.  Now a growing number of humans can begin to circle around the Christ to be taught by him directly, and no longer in a mystical and hidden way, but in a way that is woven into and on top of our daily life and awareness. But we have to develop ourselves spiritually to meet Him. His light now shines behind our earthly light, so close to us.  Saul recognizes, as each one of us must recognize in the moment of meeting the Spirit-Self, that our body, life, and soul is filled with anti-Christian forces. Our ether body is largely controlled by Ahriman or Satan, while our astral body and consciousness is largely controlled by the fallen Angel, Lucifer.  These are groups and offspring of beings that were not able to follow the regular path of spiritual evolution. They fell behind in their development and thus now try to live through their failed human stage by using us. For example, in the first moment of his illumination, Saul sees that it is he who has been rejecting Christ. In the first stage, I must painfully recognize that it is I who have killed the Christ (the Spirit and my own Self) and set up an anti-Christ on a throne inside myself. Through this awakening to the deep structure and basis of our life and consciousness, we see what actually causes illness and death (the response of the Good Gods to the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman in us), and what allows our daily consciousness with its clarity and subjectivity to arise (Lucifer and Ahriman in us). We realize that we cannot just banish them, but that we have to transform them, and through this life and soul process, transform our very human nature. But as we become conscious of Lucifer and Ahriman working in us, and face it morally, freely, cognitively and responsibly as a mature Self, their powers over us are diminished and re-oriented. Their work (which does have its purpose in the divine plan) can then proceed  in a more limited way that does not overstep its boundaries.  When Lucifer and Ahriman are separated and put into their proper places, the open human heart can then find the Christ Spirit, who shows the source of all morality: the eternal love which is “the highest soul reality of Christ-permeated man.” (p 36)  The moment of the meeting with Christ for Saul is therefore not just the single moment of a lightning-strike, but it bestows the seed and the process for a lifetime of work. Ben-Aharon writes, “Over and above his Saul-Paul duality, St Paul continuously endeavours to construct a bridge of free knowledge and moral love on which he could firmly stand, holding himself upright in the sight of the Christ and justifying his upright soul position.” (p 36)  

Each one of us can follow this pattern as we slowly and freely unfold our cognitive and moral capacities of living thinking, loving feeling, and enspirited will, to breathe in and out with our very BECOMING into the spiritual nature of the Christ Spirit. Through awakening and spiritualizing the words written by Steiner, which constitute the external form of Anthroposophy, we can then intensify and enhance the present modern appearance of Christ in the life, light, warmth, and tone of our virtual bodies, that are now becoming holy Sun-bodies. We then self-consciously and with clear concepts and full wakefulness can wed Anthroposophia with the Spirit-I AM of all humans. If we can flow together with the fluid of the text of The New Experience of the Supersensible itself, we find that it leads to the living temple of Christ. In this way Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon’s acts of wedding the living Spirit of Anthroposophy with the etheric Christ in his own being, now become a new seed and prototype in the living memory of the Earth, which we can also plant into ourselves. This is the seed that will grow into the etheric chalice that the Independent School of Spiritual Science and the Global Event College will develop to allow the Michael School to work again on Earth in the 21st and 22nd centuries. 

Chapter 3 – The Conditions of the Modern Christ Experience – The Evolution of Freedom 

Dr. Ben-Aharon indicates how the modern awakening to spiritual perception through the meeting with the new etheric revelation of the Christ must take place in moments of the clearest selfconsciousness.  The separation from the protection of the Gods that gradually took place as man was led to become increasingly isolated and independent as an ego on the earth, means that we are now prone to illness and death. Our old instinctive clairvoyance is also gone. The historical time for the old yoga, Buddhism, Taoism, and spiritualism is therefore over. But the good news is that this independence is the basic requirement for the development of a fully free and creative human individual. Contemporary enlightenment and initiation is therefore very different from its ancient forms. The future evolution of the earth depends on a co-working between individual humans who are awakening to their own solar nature, and the Christ spirit. The initial experience of the revelation of the Second Coming is not enough, but the free seed, model, and guidance given by the Christ to a selfconscious humanity, will lead to a “mutual labour and sacrifice, uniting Him and humanity ever more closely.” (p 41)  He needs us, just as we need Him. However this means that the meetings with the etheric Christ (what Ben-Aharon calls elsewhere, the Event) often arise in the midst of pain, loneliness, and despair - the real existential outcomes of our modern position on the earth. “The same flash of light that kindles the light of living spirit consciousness also illuminates the deadening, hardening forces in man’s being. And the word of life, when streaming into man’s awakened heart, shows him, in the most exact manner, the existence of evil as a mighty reality in the depth of his soul...The so-called ‘redemption’ through Christ is, therefore, something quite different from what is commonly believed and preached.  Many people, unfortunately, see in it an end to their spiritual striving. In reality, however, Christ shows man the depths and heights of his soul in order to place him in a balanced, humble, and realistic position in regard to the burdens of the past and the hopes of the future.” (p 42) 

The pain, suffering, and humility of self-knowledge can be difficult existentially, but it also allows us to find our true earthly-spiritual selves.  The ahrimanic and luciferic doubles in us will try to overcome our gentle human I AM during this process, but the Christ Spirit can guide the way to freedom. From the point of view of the instinctive clairvoyance that existed long ago in the East, human culture and consciousness from 3000 BC to 1899 AD was an age of darkness (Kali Yuga). Our instinctive spiritual and soul senses became blind and stopped working. But this time period also gave humanity a wonderful opportunity to grow. During the Kali Yuga, we slowly awakened out of our childish sleep and developed a personal sense of self, clear thinking and exact physical perception. The true meaning of our present earth evolution and the deepest essence of the Christ impulse is the gradual spiritualization of the sense of the I AM in the human being. Dr. Ben-Aharon shows in his book, Jerusalem (2019), that the main mission of the Hebrew people was to nourish this independent ego, to develop self-consciousness in a way that was different from the old innate Wisdom of the ancient days. But unfolding and intensifying the sense of Self in individual humans also means that the I AM must be able to penetrate into all of the soul and bodily coverings. “Such a work also brings with it as an unavoidable corollary, a certain devitalization, a suppression as well as corruption of the sheaths’ original constitution.” (p 43)  If we are to now to create a wholly new form of spiritual scientific clairvoyance, which does not diminish our independence and clear capacity for thinking and individual love, we need to trace the gradual separation of the etheric body from the physical body since the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. A modern physical brain capable of precise scientific reasoning was developed during the Gabriel moon period (1529-1879). This led to the rise of the mechanistic and materialistic sciences during that era, but also to a certain deformation and drying up of the physical body. The etheric body had already loosened from the physical head directly after the time of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, but in the 18th century, the etheric body (the body of light supporting the memory and life of the human being) also began to separate from the heart and lung region. This separation has negative and positive consequences: “It causes a real division of lower and upper man… an excarnating-dispering effect on the upper part of the ego together with a parallel, too strong incarnation on the lower pole.”  (p 44)  

There are 3 main results of this separation:  First, we feel a growing sense of death and dying. Second, it gives rise to the totally modern feeling of nihilism related to the half-conscious feeling of the fissure or abyss between the physical-etheric and the soul and spirit.  Third, the breaking apart of all of soul forces tends to lead to a feeling of the evaporation of the ego altogether. All you have to do is look at the growing number of suicides in order to see evidence of this contemporary reality. Thus the Christ will now appear before those who are ‘sick and sorrowful.’ These separations with their resulting painful effects are what it means for all of humanity to begin to ‘cross the threshold.’ The veils are beginning to be lifted, but humans are only dimly aware of this from its existential angst. Bringing the spiritual causes to consciousness and developing etheric cognition out of this modern angst is the purpose of 'The New Experience of the Supersensible' and really all of Ben-Aharon’s works.  The two major poles of our modern soul anxiety: emptiness and despair on one side and tragic loss of self-control in evil acts on the other, can lead to a feeling that our very soul and self is evil. World War II and the Holocaust is the most clear outcome of this modern spiritual fact. But the positive potential of this fracturing of modern man is that, if we enliven Anthroposophy in our soul and spirit, we will be ready to build the bridge to the spirit when Christ lights up our way. These two poles “are transformed, in the moment of the meeting itself, into the two pillars of the bridge of consciousness continuation: securing man’s remembrance, awareness and conscious supersensible seeing and comprehending of the living Christ.  The Christ is then seen through the metamorphosed forces of death and is experienced through the mystery of man’s evil.” (p 46) 

Summary of 'The New Experience of the Supersensible' by Ben-Aharon, Chapter 4

Chapter 4 – The Modern Christ Experience – The Meeting with the New Initiator (and Its 3 Stages) 

It is important to recognize that each step that Dr. Ben-Aharon takes in the book is tied concretely to explicit words of Rudolf Steiner that have been studied and brought to etheric, astral, and spiritual life in the biography and spiritual research of the author. To re-experience and create an individual version of what he experienced, it is very fruitful for the reader to dig into the extensive end notes, which serve as a golden thread through some of Steiner’s most important research. Hundreds of Steiner’s collected works are cited in the whole book.  But this is not intellectual scholarship, it is rather an invitation to awaken the experiences that Steiner directly demonstrated in each word – Ben-Aharon has tasted and touched the fact that every word from Steiner IS a spiritual experience that the reader must freely and creatively (and painstakingly) resurrect from its dead shells. In this chapter, Ben-Aharon relates the three major aspects of the meeting with the Christ in His modern appearance and activity: 1) the etheric or imaginative, 2) the astral or spiritual speech of inspiration, 3) and the passing over of the seed of creativity into the physical being of man, through Christ’s appearance and activity in the Spiritual Will-Fire.  The Imaginative appearance of the Christ is brought to consciousness by the forces of death that are active in the etheric body. The separation of the etheric head and heart at the source of the increased sensation of dying and emptiness in our times become a vehicle for intensified etheric sight. I can recognize in this stage how the Higher Self’s appearance is woven out of my own dying and dark etheric body. Before He lights up our darkness, we sense him as if we were in an underground cave, surrounded by flowing waters (the oil of our soul lamp). Christ pours new life and light into the whirlpool of the human being’s exhausted garments of life. Christ diminishes himself and awakens us from our death of soul. In this moment, the soul begins to pour clairvoyant light into the surroundings. The spark given by Christ ignites the oil in our soul lamp. During this experience, I can rise to see the light of the Christ Sun illuminating my life, much as it is experienced in the three days after death. Here I experience the merging of my life with the peaceful, divine life. This essential experience is the first stage of the Event. “Man feels the mightiest, irresistible upward attraction and is penetrated to the deepest core of his soul by lightness. Knowing himself in pure light, he ascends to the Sun-sphere and blends completely with its radiating abundance.” (p 51) 

This is the content of the naturally given Christ experience, but an anthroposophical deepening and research of this vision brings about the painful knowledge of HOW this vision is formed:  A dark cloud “sucks in the newly kindled, radiating soul light of man...In the disappearance of one’s newly gained soul foundations, one sees how a Being, stripped of all beauty and might, merges Himself...annihilates Himself – by surrendering His life-giving heart to darkness’s vacuum...Man observes that his sight actually grows clearer and more conscious the more...the Being sinks.” (pp 5354)  The moral shock and responsibility intensifies, as one sees that the consciousness-soul radiates darkness and death in our modern times. This is the key to the transformation of the spiritual-soul into a soul that can see Imaginatively. Every act of of self-conscious knowledge, every concept and perception, must become a participation in the new Mystery of Golgotha. The second stage (the astral or inspirative reality behind the etheric vision) arises out of the deepened knowledge of the nature of evil in the world and in myself. During this intense soul process, the Christ begins to teach by speaking in living spirit words and gestures directly into the heart and soul. Man is taught how the nature of self-consciousness is constructed. The soul is broken apart, but this split allows the soul to reorganize and recreate its members (‘re-member’ its I AM) into a new self identity. “Man knows: the power that flows in me through His words unites my separated soul forces. That which must have been seen as the evil being in one’s own soul – the distorted, twisted form of the separated soul forces – is transformed and shaped by the magic power of the word gestures into a soul being of pure, quickening and remembered spiritual life.” (p 49)   

The heart and head flow into one another and the moral and cognitive forces transform into one another; healing becomes knowledge. Man actually becomes two beings, polarized in a soul-tension. One part of myself crosses to the infinite horizon to unite with the resurrected Christ who appears objectively as Himself. Christ appears with his whole Being and every part of Him becomes expressive, silent speech. The other part of myself becomes conscious in the midst of ‘the den of thieves,’ where I now experience that the darkness of my radiating death in life and soul is actually a hostile group of multiplying evil beings. A full hearing of soul and spirit words awakens, and healing, living gestures pour down into the hostile beings from the yonder side of the abyss. They create a new form of my being. It speaks: “I am your true I-builder and preserver, through absorbing and carrying your evil in my heart of love; I am becoming your new I, recreated in the destructive core of your evil, shaped in the image of my eternal Life Spirit. Remember yourself in me.” (p 59)  This reaches its climax when a seed is given by the Christ so that I can perform independent supersensible research that is self-motivated, creative, and voluntary. I can learn how to dynamically erase and re-create my own soul and spiritual consciousness. This shows me how to build the bridge of spiritual remembrance over the abyss where I forget the spirit, like forgetting my dreams as I wake up in the morning.  The fabric of my being is rebuilt as a moral ground.  I consciously live with my evil nature, but joyfully begin to accept it and work on it. The third stage is intuitive and spiritual to the highest degree, but this means that it also lies behind what I perceive as the physical world itself. I step out of myself totally and am penetrated through and through my another spiritual presence.

The inner touch of Christ plants the seed of responsibility for the future recreation of the whole Earth and humanity in my inmost life. The Higher Self on the other side of the chasm separating memory and spirit life now crosses back to my lower self. The Christ moves, acts, and passes through my physical being and leaves a fiery seed within me. I awaken in physical reality, but now this reality is fully interpenetrated by spiritual reality. Christ appears in the spirit-fire and a new form of consciousness is born in me, in my most opaque and dense parts. It is “crystal clear...ultimate creative freedom experienced in heavenly transparency, in the heart of absolute coarse density.” (p 61)   As in the first stage, darkness became light, and in the second stage, my new being was shaped out of evil, in the third stage “the ground of all heaviness, streams lightly through its infinite zero point of transubstantiation in man himself.” It speaks: “In your bread of life that I broke in twain while passing and in the fiery spirit of your life I have seeded the fiery seed of My life. This you can assimilate into your being, and in it the world is resurrected from the dead. I thereby transfer to your creative hands and feet the responsibility to nurture and mother the Earth and all its kingdoms of life. I give to you that which until now was protected under My care alone: the future world-seed, containing infinite evolutionary riches and possibilities.” (p 61)

Summary of 'The New Experience of the Supersensible' by Ben-Aharon, Chapter 5

Chapter 5 – The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming (A deep anthroposophical study of the transformation of thinking, sense-perception, and building the bridge of spirit-remembrance through the Moral-Cognitive Aspects of the work with the Etheric Christ)

If a researcher is going to recreate the naturally given meeting with the soul of Christ in the invisible world of life and light, using an Imaginative and moral anthroposophical elevation of consciousness, there are two obstacles that must be overcome – ordinary thinking and ordinary perception. Furthermore, such supersensible research has to be remembered in normal consciousness, and therefore a new sort of spiritual memory must be developed. The three parts of the chapter elaborate in great detail how this can be done. Once again, Dr. Ben-Aharon has carefully consulted and re-experienced what Rudolf Steiner had to say about the main issues in hundreds of texts. One can follow this trail in the robust end notes. The basic process that happens when a human being sees and thinks about objects in the world has been one of the main concerns in Ben-Aharon’s books, such as the lectures in Spiritual Science in the 21st Century, Cognitive Yoga, the Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art and to a certain extent, Jerusalem. He focuses on how modern subjective consciousness and possession of clear ideas is created by a mostly unconscious process of appropriating the living spiritual world (which is a wholeness into which the human being is fully woven) and reversing it. Human consciousness splits the singular spiritual ocean of wholeness into many selves, objects, and problems of knowledge. The real world of spirit, soul, and life is paralyzed, killed, frozen, and solidified into mental pictures, words, and abstract ideas.  The good part is that this has allowed the modern ego to become independent, strong and free. Clear perception and logical thinking has also allowed the development of precise and orderly hard sciences, based on strict mathematical organization with a moderate degree of community verification and unbiased experimentation. In modern abstract thinking, calculation, and scientific research, thinking has finally completely broken itself off of the starry, ensouled, and living world in which it was born. This is a positive development for the earth and humanity, because it creates free individuals. The bad part is that the cognitive and moral reversal of the world is not recognized. The ego spreads its veil over the spiritual world, but the subjective human forgets it. What we are left with is a dead world, like the reflection in the mirror. Spiritual scientific elevation of consciousness must find a way to cross this canyon back to the real world. 

Opening the Gate of Thinking  (How to Spiritualize Thinking)

In order to do this, we have to become aware of how in each reflective thought, pictorial fantasizing, intellectual speculation, memory, and calculation, an element of our own life stream is suppressed, paralyzed, emptied out, reversed, digested, and forgotten. We have to find the original life that we strangle in every thought. This struggle to uncover it awakens an existential angst, but the inner burning fire of anguish and modern confusion at the heart of this modern problem of consciousness can be effectively used, if it is changed into a calm tool of research. We have to be able to stand the pain, suffering, and feeling of dying. When we use Rudolf Steiner’s living epistemological texts, like the Philosophy of Freedom, to uncover the pure will which is creating concepts at the center of thinking, we eventually find that Christ himself is covered over precisely at this boundary between living real thinking, and its fragmented, dead reflection.  The shocking paradox is that Christ is crucified, He sacrifices Himself, in order for us to develop self-conscious thinking. Our solidity of belief and consciousness that we are living as free personalities in a world of material objects suffocates the etheric Christ. He dies where thinking dies. Where real thinking dies and becomes mere representations, He also disappears. Because He is the source of the I AM who creates and wills all spiritual, living thinking. We have to struggle to wake up to this consciously. This means to reawaken to the utmost spiritual nature of our own higher self. To stand firmly in our mental ground, we kill the Christ, but by uncovering the moment of creating the past moment, we create the possibility of consciously working with Him, learning from Him, and weaving together with Him. (pp 65-69)  This is what Ben-Aharon calls the Event of Thinking in other books such as The Colmar Lecture in Spiritual Science in the 21st Century. To find this time and place where thinking dies, and thus to awaken spiritually to the new appearance of the Christ spirit in the etheric world, we must first break through the solid ice of our reflections, and cancel our mental picturing.  This reflective association of subjective ideas puts a veil over reality and the vision of the future which is always part of us. We must find and experience how the will actually regulates life and death in our conscious thinking. How is this mental image, feeling of inner self, and memory of the past formed? “There is a freezing and preservation of the difference of time that has elapsed, a stretching and spacing of time – a killing of time and a temporal immortalization and preservation of the killed time – in every act of ideation and perception...Every moment of our life-time that is raised into self-consciousness is in this way always split in two, [1] into a living and creative unknown element...pushed back and preserved as future potentiality, and [2] into something that is fixed, made non-living and hence, remains as an available element for later recollection.” (p 70).  The potential self coming to us from the future that we always forget (in the act of remembering!), is like a dark brother that is discovered in the pure will that creates thinking’s elements. We therefore have to build a solid ‘stone’ of conscious awareness in this precise area in the act of knowledge, experiencing our modern death, crucifixion, and resurrection in each moment of conscious thinking. We then can make the veil of death in our conscious thinking transparent once again, by pouring our life back into it. “We begin to transform the being of Death into our cross of supersensible perception, which is the gate of vision that thinking has opened with our soul...We see ourselves hovering over the abyss that opens under our mind’s feet in-between the dark and sinking, life-carrying will seed and the birth of the abstract, clear daylight of thinking...dividing ourselves consciously into two selves, viewing both from the two directions.” (pp 71-72)  

We can recognize how the World Self puts its seal on the creative life of the Logos, dismembering but preserving its offspring in the destructive flow of time. The place and time where thinking dies is described by Steiner in the essential passage from Occult Physiology, where he describes how the two etheric streams come together inside the head (one from above and one from below), near the pineal and pituitary glands. The union of the two streams in between these poles can be canceled, and when the two streams are consciously held apart, a new flow of empty time or pure duration arises. This can allow the astral body to free itself from the dying-engraving process of memory-formation. We can then perceive the Christ-consciousness arising from the empty tomb of the head, looking from outside. “In...daily consciousness, we have thinking always ‘in front’ of our eyes, guided by the unseen will at our back. This thinking leads us outward into the external world. But now we have turned around at life’s threshold; we look inward into the dark of spirit night, as we formerly looked out into the external light of day. At noon time, we had thinking’s impetus, the will, behind us: now we have thinking’s memory behind us, guiding us, as Ariadne’s thread, into the inner labyrinth of living will.” (p 77)  

We learn how to cross pure thinking and the will to awaken the new supersensible vision of the invisible life that surrounds us. The Imagination of the reversed thinking awakens as a triumphant being, like Michael holding his conscious-sword. But a deeper and gradual soul and moral transformation must also develop. To practice this, one must focus the will on a single concept, while setting aside the pictorial elements and dynamic elements of thinking and willing in the head. With intense awareness, we let the concept disappear and a negative thought space opens. A sucking vacuum of empty space turns us inside out. The universal wills in us. The infinite circumference and periphery takes me over as I surrender to its openness. Through this experience of the externalized WILL, we begin to feel an invitation to return to our center. An invisible spirit hand leads us to look into the source of our everyday and also Imaginative thinking. We see and dance in the radiant light and pools of ethereal beings of thought. We know that we are now living in the prenatal life of our thought. We find ourselves surrounded by thought-like babies (some loving, some treacherous) who ask us to conceive them in thought. A mocking and warning thought element can arise here, which shocks us back toward our earthly consciousness, and we now follow it back recognizing on the way how thinking sacrifices itself in dying down into the senses. As we approach the solid elements of etheric-physical remembrance that we have consciously built, our soul is completely broken apart. But the conscious anchor we have built between normal consciousness and spiritual Imagination helps to keep our wholeness from disappearing altogether. In this breaking apart of the soul, our thinking and our willing fly away into different dimensions. Our center is lost. I become the human-world abyss. I cannot find my I, until a third being arises in between thinking and willing. Thinking and willing must learn to create a new astral feeling nature out of the abyss.  “It is this recognition of the mysterious nature of ‘feeling’ that now becomes the most unstable and vulnerable, but the only uniting sense of coherent identity… I only exist as an I when my two divided poles recognize in the third my surfacing abyss. I am only when I consciously feel the division in my broken soul centre; when I am not, I am. In constant decay, I am whole...Man hears the inner soul aspect of his participation in the etheric Mystery of Golgotha.” (p 82)  The Christ articulates it as “Out of the opening abyss of your thinking’s grave I arise. I was crucified in your thoughts; now I am resurrected in your self-consciously incurred soul death and dissolution. You are dismembered out of Me; it is your future task to re-member yourself – by means of your own forces – into Me again. Otherwise you would lose your human form entirely, and slide increasingly into the world-abyss of your soul.” (p 82). 

5.B – Opening the Gate of Sense-Perception 

The elements of this section of the chapter are expanded upon in the whole of Ben-Aharon’s book, Cognitive Yoga, which concentrates most of its work on demonstrating how to spiritualize, virtualize, or etherize the elements of sense-perception. Nevertheless, every sentence in The New Experience of the Supersensible, including this section, is absolutely precise, alive, and derived from experience rather than hypothesis. Therefore, our senses of seeing color, smelling flowers, touching the grass, feeling the warmth of the Sun, and so on can become wakeful spiritual perceptions. Etherized sense-perception can become ‘formative world-thinking’. “Man as a cognitive being of thinking and sense-perception, taken as a whole and consciously transformed, is the twofold bridge...having individualized the abyss...and made it into his own inner world, [the human being] can carry the fruits of Earth to the heavens.” (p. 83)  The sense objects we perceive are not really out there in space. We freeze them and squeeze out their living streams in every perception. We kill the living light, and the living soul and spiritual world in every sensation, just like we do in forming every mental image. The mental image blocks us from living thinking, just as the object blocks us from spiritualized perception – so we must learn how to dissolve and redeem the living streams in the ‘object.’ We unconsciously glue together the frozen light and sensation-crystals with the dead mental image, and this produces everyday consciousness, knowledge, objects, and subjective self-security. So we must learn how to separate these elements. “An ‘object’ is, in the purely sense-world, an etheric-elemental flowing reality, fixated, cemented and sedimented, made dense and heavy through...our bodily, willed touch.” (p 85) 

 “In the moment we cease [the object’s] unconscious consolidation, it etherizes, becomes transparent and rent in twain, revealing the real living and ensouled world-man behind it.” (p 84)  How do we do this?  We must come to experience how the spiritual senses of life, movement, and balance penetrate into our senses of sight, touch, smell, and taste, and produce the mental conviction that I am a material body living among other material bodies that really exist. A weakly perceived sense of spiritual equilibrium joined with a strongly perceived color produces the idea of material existence. We need to dive into the region of opaqueness between our inner senses and our outer senses and become conscious of how the sense of sight and hearing are sucked too deeply into the body, while the sense of balance and movement are projected too far outside. These over-extensions block the spiritual perception, so we have to re-balance them. When we gently become aware of the sense of the inner movement of the body and the sense of the outer sounds, and then separate their streams, we can become aware of the whole web of WILL that flows inside and outside through the whole world. We see the outer etheric world and the inner spiritual nature of the body by doing this. (For more on this technique, see Cognitive Yoga). The complete nature of the process of strengthening our lives, souls, and spirits in order to completely open the gates of spiritualized sense-perception is then elaborated. The guiding thread is that we can learn how to consciously bring the autumn processes into the spring processes. [1] By practicing the plant exercises in Rudolf Steiner’s Knowledge of Higher Worlds (especially the seed and the mature plant elements), we awaken to the pulsing rivers and cliffs of time flowing through the etheric body. We find the “eternal fountains of life within the Christ-permeated part of man’s etheric body.” (p 87)  [2] The dying and blossoming elements of life and time are then moved in and out of each other; the future and past cliffs of time move in and out of each other. “This process is intensified until the two streams not only reach and touch in each other’s infinite end point but, pouring themselves through the other’s infinity, merge into one stream that circles and reverses itself through a central point for both time formations at once.” (p 87) The life of the fully grown plant and the seed pass into one another in a pulse; the seasons pass into each other in a crossing point of rhythmic expansion and contraction.  [3]  After this life cycle in the etheric body is consciously formed, we begin to focus on the soul or astral drama of the whole cycle of life, death, and rebirth in the subtle changes of feeling throughout the year. This is outlined in Rudolf Steiner’s 'Calendar of the Soul.' 

We travel from soul sympathy, and expanding warmth and love, but then begin to dim down again in pain, coldness and antipathy.  After much practice, we find that the winter processes begin to take the upper hand. The cold abyss of death and inner powerlessness start to dominate the harmonious and sympathetic development of feelings in our soul-year. We can find no power to break the increasing ascendancy of this dying, painful freezing and so this then brings the soul cycle to a complete stop. [4] However, the pain, contraction, and dying in the life and soul can be then neutralized, and the whole process is lifted to the Ego or level of the I.  “There man must struggle to discover the inner point where no vital change and no change of consciousness can overpower him...[One] can freely master the natural streams in his elemental body, and freely direct his soul attention and so cross the time streams at will.” (p 88)  We learn how to consciously carry the whole life cycle and soul year, but also experience the complete development of the resurrection of the ego and the whole of nature through Christ. Then Ben-Aharon gives a complete demonstration of how to spiritualize an individual perception. We start with a seed, for example. We note all of its sense perceptual elements, like color and hardness. We then actively think through all of the ideas connected with it. Our goal is to strengthen the elements of normal thinking and perception and then SEPARATE them. 

We have to learn to only think when we are intuiting ideas. We must learn only to perceive when we are sensing sounds and textures. Each must be brought into its own dimension. No overlapping. The gap must be then widened between them. Pure time must flow. One now stops the forming of mental images and memory. I merely perceive the pure flow of color.  When we cancel reflection, as our eyes and senses swim in the light surrounding every ‘object’, eventually we can flow into the World-Imaginations which always surround us and there perceive the Etheric Christ.  In the colored streams of life, we also find that the true Spiritual I is also able to swim there, outside of all concepts and bodies. We can then be taught how to create new life in this living life stream. The world creates a new human as well. When we learn how to consciously control the vitalizaton and devitalization, by repeatedly practicing these transformation of sense-perception and thinking, we can then consciously build the faculty of spiritual remembrance.  This means to control the living sources of space and time, and to perceive how we are woven together in the World Imaginations of our Angel and the Christ. 

5C – The Construction of the Bridge to Remember what Happens and what always Exists in my Spiritual Being and in the Spiritual World – the Development of Continuity of Consciousness 

In this section, Dr. Ben-Aharon demonstrates how tunnels or bridges of consciousness are created between the soul and spiritual Self and the living physical body and ego on the Earth. As in the earlier sections of the book, he divides this into a thinking, willing, and feeling element or an etheric, astral, and spiritual element. The bridge-construction means far more than following color streams inside the head or merely having visions in the mind’s eye. The continuity of consciousness, memory, and communication between heaven and earth is not only filled with world-images and creative soul-speech (very different in nature from visions and hearing voices), but also with moral crises of self knowledge and soul transformation, as well as creative seeds of future spiritual-physical acts.  This development of an entirely new life, soul, and spirit breathing of consciousness between the spiritual worlds and our earthly life there has an Imaginative, Inspirational, and Intuitive level in the strict spiritual-scientific senses. We rebuild our whole being. First, Ben-Aharon describes how an echo of the physical sense of a centered ego and the memory of self has to be carried into the supersensible experience. The spiritual researcher must remember who he was on the earth and then also consciously write an extract of the current soul and spiritual experience onto the physical-etheric mirror that exists on the earth, while he or she is still on the other side. I must consciously dim down, devitalize, and condense my etheric, soul, and spiritual experiences and push them back across the gap of forgetfulness. 

First, the pure will force of thinking and meaning as well as the cloud formations of cosmic time must be woven into a single rhythmic force. This is at the heart of the ‘new yoga will’ or Michaelic Yoga that Steiner described and which Ben-Aharon developed in Cognitive Yoga. This centralizing pulse or tool is another stone or cross or zone of remaining awake that can contribute the first step of this process of continuity of memory.  Spiritualizing thinking, although still very difficult, is the easier pole for modern human beings (it is like redeeming the first thief crucified with Christ). To transform sense perception into etheric perception of the cosmic development of meaningful timestreams lies at a higher degree of difficulty.  What are these forces and where is the zone in which we unite them?  One must remain awake at the moment where subjective thinking ends and one is turned inside out and the pure will thinks me (but now I AM also at the source of this will). This is the zone of the first Umstülpung or reversal in thinking. The second zone is brought into clear consciousness at the place where our normal perception of the colors, sounds, smells, and sensations of an ‘object’ meet the “world’s living, streaming time-pictures” (p 96) flowing into the etheric eye-stream. Before these two streams completely merge, we hold on to the zone of their difference. Then we begin to pull in the pure etheric streams of sensation rivers and push out the will-thinking activity.  Living-dying thinking and dying-living perception are then woven together or crossed into a new zone of consciousness with a self-aware I AM. “It is the eternal...soul breathing and spirit pulsating of the ‘I’ at, over and in the mystery of world-man bridge creation – phoenix-like ever vitalizing, devitalizing and revitalizing itself in order to awaken, create and increase cosmic self-consciousness.” (p 97)  This is the cognitive part of the bridge, “standing still at the point of man’s singularity, founding self-consciousness in the zero point of space and the breaking through of living, cyclically self-annihilating and self-resurrecting time.” (p 98)  

Technique for Transforming Materialistic Thoughts or Confronting the Dragon with the Sword of Michael 

Then Ben-Aharon outlines one cognitive-meditative technique so that the Michaelic force in us can battle the Dragon in order to build the shining crystal bridge. First, you begin by choosing, reading, understanding, and thinking through a specific line of scientific or philosophical thought, which is clearly materialistic (dead, abstract, ahrimanic) in its linkage and development of ideas. “The great classical materialists of the 19th century are the best” (p 99), people such as Ludwig Buechner, Jacob Moleschott, Marx, Freud, Darwin, and Auguste Comte. Kant is also useful and one can use Hegel for practice, but the Hegelian dialectic is already half alive, so each person doing the practice must choose his or her own materialist ‘enemy’ to struggle with and transform. Indeed, after one becomes proficient, any line of thought and concept can be spiritualized, from any era. What do we do? Study it, and think it through very carefully and thoroughly with ordinary and absolutely clear consciousness. (For example, from Darwin - “Even without any change in the proportional numbers of the animals on which our [swiftest and slimmest] wolf preyed, a cub might be born with an innate tendency to pursue certain kinds of prey. Nor can this be thought very improbable; for we often observe great differences

in the natural tendencies of our domestic animals; one cat, for instance, taking to catch rats, another mice; one cat...bringing home winged game, another...rabbits, and another hunting on marshy ground and almost nightly catching woodcocks or snipes. The tendency to catch rats rather than mice is known to be inherited. Now, if any slight innate change of habit or of structure benefited an individual wolf, it would have the best chance of surviving and of leaving offspring.” - The Origin of Species). You must pull it deeply down into the physical brain itself, not remaining floating and confused. You use all the best forces of modern thinking. You feel that you grasp it inwardly and strongly. Only then can the ‘deactualization’ process (as he calls it in The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art) begin. 

You now separate the intellectual content (the meaning and mental pictures) from the pure form of the chosen line of thought.  Then you concentrate all of your forces only on the pure development of dynamic forces or energy that is left over from this intellectual linkage of concepts in the head.  Let us imagine that the line of thought or the content of the materialistic argument from Marx is linked together like movie pictures projected from a boat onto a series of icebergs as ‘screens.’ These different size icebergs and their order on the water are the pure forms. When you stop projecting the movie onto the icebergs, only the crystalline shapes of the iceberg remains, along with their sizes and the particular way that the different icebergs are linked up to one another. Only the inner feeling of having this particular linkage of icebergs in your head remains. The residue from the argument resonates with its own energy, like electrical currents, even though you have forgotten or wiped away the ideas themselves. Focus on just the forces (of course, to be consistent we would have to imagine that in our analogy the icebergs were formed along with the projection of the movie – the meaning of the movie in a sense formed its own screen). The separation between form and content takes place behind the eyes, but the pure forces are poured back into the middle brain and finally down into the spinal column. When the hollow tunnel connecting the forehead with the spinal column is perceived, this signals the release of the etheric brain from the physical brain. Then you carry the pure form and force dynamic residue of the thought sequence repeatedly into the etheric body from head to heart. 

Ben-Aharon writes: 

“We 1) begin to experience the thought's forms around the larynx region in inner light-shade perception; 2) we begin to feel the thought's warmth and frost formations and emanations as direct inner contact in the heart region; and 3) we can voluntarily enhance this process and condense it to such an extent that, in and through the heart, it radiates its coldness or warmth forces into the whole body, into the hands and then back into the eyes and inner head, until the circle of freed etheric activity, started in the brain, is—through heart and limbs—closed and made thereby etherically, imaginatively visible as a totality. When we are securely grounded in our meditation so far, we can begin the actual 'heart confrontation' with the inner ahrimanic forces dwelling in the force-dynamic of the thought process which we have worked through. This confrontation is brought about through the most intensive condensation of the freezing-cold atmosphere that emanated from the forces released in the meditation described above, extracted from a thoroughly assimilated materialistic thought dynamic. Man gathers and guides all the sub-earthly head forces, which assume in the larynx region a darkening arrow or spear form, and then—being morally and cognitively permeated with the Christ-impulse—condenses its cold spirit like metal further still and thereby also sharpens its cutting astral edge. He thrusts it consciously into his warm, luminous heart centre until it begins to bleed etherically. Imaginatively speaking, the drops of blood freeze in bleeding and are transformed into the shining Quint-Essentia pearls and diamonds on which the bridge is constructed. When this process begins to ray itself in pictures back to the head centre—circulating backwards and upwards in the consciously transformed and thereby closed etheric circuit—it becomes imaginatively visible. 

In the backward radiating inner imaginative pictures we perceive now the etheric bridge of remembrance arched majestically over the abyss of time's annihilation stream, shining with pure spirit light in the ahrimanic night of our age. This imaginative faculty is achieved as the result of the transformation process of the world intelligence that fell into the claws of Ahriman, now returned to its source as fully humanized Michaelic intelligence. This faculty is the Michael sword, and the process described above is the inner work of its conscious spiritual- scientific steeling. As we saw above, its metallic substantiality was won for the Michaelic forces in the inner fight with the materialistic and intellectual ahrimanic forces that control the modern human brain. It was then etherically transfigured and steeled in the fire of the human Christ-permeated heart. This sword is the power that serves both to perceive and to overcome Ahriman's presence in the physical-etheric subterranean world, where he unfolds his mightiest power as the guardian and lord of all elemental intellectuality that is immersed and externalized in objectivity, far from its original source in the macro- cosmic heart centre. The process described above is precisely that to which Rudolf Steiner referred in the moment when he fierily exclaimed: ‘We must find the possibility to turn to our supersensible heart!’” (pp 99-100) 

Now Ben-Aharon describes the astral or soul side of building the bridge of the continuity of memory, sense of self, and consciousness.  You must return to the complete soul shattering and intense moral pain of self-knowledge standing before the burnt down cross, where Christ is continuously crucified in the etheric world today. You have to begin to consciously control your entire moral breakdown in your heart. You carry a tiny element of the dead forces of the head out into broken soul world. You project a willed aspect of myself over the abyss; but this means you become the void and take in the nothingness. You widen the split in the soul and the world time pictures or living Imaginations are woven into the emptiness of your soul void. Then you see the shocking picture of the lower forces of your soul. You have to slowly and gently learn how to morally move with the soul through astral space. To go backwards in the soul space is “to strive towards the moral soul state that can stand upright under the living-dying, burning-freezing etheric cross; one has an upward, morally self-sustaining force in the soul world only then.” (p 103)  Remember that everything in the astral is the opposite of earthly orientation, shape, and movement.  

You must be able to stand in the face of our moral ugliness without shame, then one can navigate back to the etheric-physical cross to remember what happened in the soul and spirit world.  To move forward in soul space, you must admit that you cannot find the being that can overcome your evil in the astral world. Only weakness and helplessness can paradoxically form the solidity necessary at this stage. One becomes the world-man moral riddle in the helpless abyss, and this is woven into the I feeling. One can only offer one’s wound and pure life question up to the Christ at this moment. “Only when we are grounded in this absolute dualism and fragmentation of our moral being may we be granted the Christ experience at this stage...Then there resounds, as a spoken, cosmically articulated answer, a spirit-filled affirmation from the other, higher spirit side of oneself.” (pp 103-104)  Like Christ lifting Peter above the waters of the ocean, the Higher Self can now unite with the lower self, the memory, and the soul.  It can fill the being of man with its healing creative power. Then the descending and the ascending are woven together. The Christ Spirit gives the power of creation to the earthly human being. A new drama of creativity can begin, filled with new acts, formed out of the first stage of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming.